Cloudflare launches HTTP/2 Server Push for all customers

Cloudflare has launched something cool that I don't entirely understand. It's offering support for something called "HTTP/2 Server Push" to all of its customers, for free.

Cloudflare, as you probably know, specializes in keeping sites online even if hackers would prefer they weren't. They also offer a range of optimization tools to increase load times and improve reliablility.

As I understand it, HTTP/2 Server Push is related to the latter. It pushes images and other page elements to users before their browser has even requested them. That promises to shave up to one second from page load times. As CEO Matthew Prince explains it: “If with HTTP/2 Server Push we’re able to save one second off every page load served across CloudFlare’s network at our current scale, we would save about 10,000 years of time every day that people would have otherwise spent waiting for the Internet to load.”

So that's good. Also it's free to all Cloudflare users, which is also good.

You might wonder why I'm writing about a feature that I don't really understand. The answer to that is two-fold. First, I like Cloudflare a lot. I liked them when they entered TechCrunch Disrupt with an amazing pitch and were beaten out by something called Quikky or Kwikki or similar. And I like them today because they've chosen Pando as the demo site for their HTTP/2 Server Push launch.